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WASHINGTON, March 2 (UPI) -- (Editor's note: Sometimes it's hard to tell whether you're tackling parenthood in the 21st century -- or being tackled by it. This is the latest in a series of reflections by UPI writers.) Grandfathers are obsessed with time.
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Not time to do all the things we want to do: Go back to Russia and see old friends, write a novel outside a Paris cafe, learn to sail a sloop, get an 18-year-old Japanese woman to walk on my back -- there will never be enough time for that.
What grandparents need is time to tell the little ones the things they need to know: Never swing on a knuckle ball, watch a football into your hands before looking downfield for the run, hit backhands ahead of your body, organize everything you do, even homework, and have your own space in which to work.
Don't give other people the power to hurt you with words, don't give other people the power to tell you what to think, approach sacred truth with suspicion.
Love those around you intensely: You'll never regret telling people you love them; you'll only regret passing up the opportunity to tell people you love them.
Granny and I thought we'd have to pass up my granddaughter's third birthday celebration, planned for my sister's sprawling house all the way at the other end of West Virginia, about an eight-hour drive away. The weekend before the trip, our little town in Northern Virginia was hit with about 30 inches of snow.
Though physically and emotionally drained from watching through the window as my wife dug the cars out, I remained optimistic and we got away on time. We even stopped overnight in a motel to break up the trip.
The pain hit me around 2 a.m. Angina in both arms and across the back and the neck.
"This is ridiculous," I remember thinking. "I'm a grown man and I can't get out of bed." Images out of Kafka fluttered past my eyelids.
The angina kept me pinned on the bed, like an insect on a display card, for what seemed like a long time, but was probably only a few minutes. When it subsided somewhat, I staggered to my feet and woke up the wife. She gave me a tiny nitroglycerin pill, which does wonders under the tongue.
The pain was not unexpected. My doctor has been predicting it. I had a stent installed in 2000 to open up a blocked artery. Stents tend to collect plaque -- a condition called stenosis -- and at some point the returning angina will hit you like an ex-wife hiding behind the door with a baseball bat.
Sometime soon, they'll put me in the hospital again, take the old stent out and put one or two new ones in. Like they just did with Bill Clinton. Sometime. I just don't have the time for it right now.
At my sister's house, my long-legged Viking of a granddaughter, with laser-beam blue eyes and cornsilk hair, had a great time being "the queen of everything" for a few hours. But my time with her was limited. And to tell the truth, this time around I was losing the popularity contest to her other grandparents -- close friends but deadly skilled opponents for a child's attention.
And, also frankly, I was feeling less than par. My geezer index was high, and my granddaughter and her little brother could sense it.
Exiled to the periphery of the party, I tried to explain my need for time to the other adults.
"When my Texas grandfather was born in the 1890s," I told them, "there were still people alive who could remember when Jefferson and Adams died on the same Independence Day in 1826."
I had their attention now.
My father was in the 4th Armored Division, damned Patton's spearhead, during World War II. The tanks were named after Civil War Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who taught Georgia that war is hell.
"When my father went to war in the 1940s with Sherman tanks," I said. "Sherman himself had only been dead 65 years.
"We're really a very young country."
I could tell by their startled eyes that they were really impressed by what I had to say. Either that or they were edging toward the door.
I guess my point was that the country is so young it can be measured by a handful of generations. And that time is a slippery concept to grasp, but we can use yardsticks.
And that we must make time, layer by layer, or it will run through our fingers like sand. Time to do the necessary things. Like attend a child's birthday party, or see the old folks in the retirement home.
Because, soon, before we know it, it may be time to go.
